“VISUAL MANUFACTURING”. EFFECTS OF MANUFACTURING ON THE VISUAL AND FORMAL GENERATION OF ARTEFACTS

This paper describes an educational experience held at the Design School of Politecnico di Milano, Italy, during the first year of Bachelor Course in Product Design, in 2014/15.

The Course develops in two parts. In the first one, teachers describe - through lectures and Basic Design exercises - theoretical elements of visual perception applied to product design. The objective is to make the students aware of the fundamental principles of perception that concur to define the formal generation of an artefact.

The second part was dedicated to a final exercise called “resetting and reshaping” consisting in the application of such visual elements to reconfigure - from the visual and formal point of view - a set of four dishes.

For their projects, students had to choose some visual elements, from the ones learned in the first part of the Course, while they were free to choose any material, shape and color they wanted. They did not have to make any technical drawing or deep manufacturing study, but they had to design a plausible set of dishes. For this reason, they had to consider the manufacturing aspects of products so to make sure that, eventually, they would design a set of dishes close to be actually feasible. In this perspective, teachers gave a brief lecture on manufacturing processes with some hints on the limits in the making of forms, details and finishing.

To achieve such result, students were asked to make a real-scale model of their project. To do that, the teachers proposed them to follow a design process that was based on sketching and making tentative mock-ups from the very beginning. For this reason, students had to deal with an important issue: to choose the manufacturing technic for the model so that it would represent at best the final product (plausible shape, material, finishing, color and visual effects) and so that they could succeed in the making of it.

Observing this design process, the authors realized that the understanding/feasibility of manufacturing processes could influence fundamental design choices, during the creative phase of design process. Thus, the authors investigated the relationship between manufacturing processes (of model and final product) and design choices, concerning, in particular, the generation of form and visual effects.

For the investigation the authors did not interfered during the course development, so to let the students act naturally in their choices. Then, when the course ended, the authors analyzed the results, made a questionnaire to a selection of students, and asked them to self-reflect on their design process.

In this paper, the authors will show examples of the set of dishes to explain and discuss the findings of this Course and investigation, which are particularly interesting, being the students at the first year of their design education.